What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Anything from run & guns to modern RPGs, what else do you play?
Steven
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Steven »

Sima Tuna wrote: Tue Jan 21, 2025 4:03 pm Girls love the Tales series. My sister is a much bigger Tales fan than I am. She owns all the games that were localized. I don't know why girls love Tales so much, but they really do.
Got bored today and decided to do some research about it in Japanese. Turns out that the answer is pretty simple, and exactly what I expected: a lot of Japanese girls find the male characters in Tales games to be super hot. That's the reason.

Decided to mess with the Retrotink a little bit to see about finding better PS2 settings, so I ended up using it as an excuse to have fun with glitches in Abyss. Nothing better than
Spoiler
using Asch to fight Asch
at the end of the game. I love that silly glitch, and it's one of several reasons that I will never ever recommend the 3DS version over the PS2 versions, but it's too bad his equipment is so bad that it severely cripples his ability to do anything. I know there are codes to remove it, but I have a US GameShark and am playing the Japanese version, so I don't know if the codes or even the GameShark will even work. I should probably just go get a Japanese GameShark equivalent.
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Sima Tuna
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sima Tuna »

Steven wrote: Wed Jan 22, 2025 9:04 am
Sima Tuna wrote: Tue Jan 21, 2025 4:03 pm Girls love the Tales series. My sister is a much bigger Tales fan than I am. She owns all the games that were localized. I don't know why girls love Tales so much, but they really do.
Got bored today and decided to do some research about it in Japanese. Turns out that the answer is pretty simple, and exactly what I expected: a lot of Japanese girls find the male characters in Tales games to be super hot. That's the reason.
I think it also has to do with the number of Tales games with large, fleshed-out female casts. Aside from the token titty monster in each game, most of the girls tend to be fairly realistically-proportioned too. Some of the Tales games have female protagonists and others have female Deuteragonists or female "Main" characters who aren't the point-of-view character (like Collette in Symphonia.)
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hazys
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by hazys »

Dark Cloud. In a way it's both archaic and forward-looking: an action-RPG "roguelite" with a town-builder. A gameplay structure that was basically only popular in the mid-90s and now. Very rough in places, clearly a launch-window game. You spend most of the time in randomly-generated dungeons whacking enemies with the same attack string, opening treasure chests, and managing thirst/weapon durability.

The thirst I don't mind, but the weapon durability is kind of crazy. Weapons last basically nothing, and if you don't repair them before they break they break forever. This wouldn't be such a big deal if the game's only upgrade system didn't revolve around upgrading your weapons and having them absorb extra attributes, then using those weapons as materials for even stronger weapons and so on. You can spend hours on end crafting the perfect weapon only to have it disappear because you weren't paying attention to the durability meter. I'm not so much complaining as I am expressing my awe at something that would never fly today.

Unfortunately the combat just isn't very interesting. You unlock six characters each with their own weapon type, and you'll quickly want to use the ranged fighters to spare yourself the tedium of melee combat. Controls also feel a bit loose and slippery. The town-building aspect is actually quite charming: you find people, objects, and buildings in the dungeon and then place them on your little town in a zoomed-out diorama mode. Then you can zoom back in and explore the town as you arranged it. This feels impressive but it's overall a relatively small part of the game once you're past the first dozen-ish hours.

There is a lot of charm and cozy warm-blanket ambiance here, typical of Level-5 at the time. There's also a 100-floor post-game dungeon for those who want it. I've had my fill though.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Steven »

Sima Tuna wrote: Wed Jan 22, 2025 4:23 pm
Steven wrote: Wed Jan 22, 2025 9:04 am
Sima Tuna wrote: Tue Jan 21, 2025 4:03 pm Girls love the Tales series. My sister is a much bigger Tales fan than I am. She owns all the games that were localized. I don't know why girls love Tales so much, but they really do.
Got bored today and decided to do some research about it in Japanese. Turns out that the answer is pretty simple, and exactly what I expected: a lot of Japanese girls find the male characters in Tales games to be super hot. That's the reason.
I think it also has to do with the number of Tales games with large, fleshed-out female casts. Aside from the token titty monster in each game, most of the girls tend to be fairly realistically-proportioned too. Some of the Tales games have female protagonists and others have female Deuteragonists or female "Main" characters who aren't the point-of-view character (like Collette in Symphonia.)
Yeah, there is that too. Even then, I think that most of even the busty girls in the series still have pretty realistic proportions. That reminds me that I chose Jude as the protagonist when I played Xillia. I heard later that picking Milla makes the game more interesting somehow, provided that you played as Jude already, but like with Graces, I forgot so much about the game that I'm still probably going to choose Jude again if the game gets rereleased like that supposed leak from a while ago suggested. I hope it does, as I'd like to revisit it and actually finish it this time. I got the game just before I moved back to Japan and I guess I dropped it due to not having a TV or monitor or anything after the move.

Did you become an adult yet or are you still in the childhood part? I'm about 40~50% done with the regular game, so not counting the f part. It's so weird because I keep going to places and I'm like "I remember this place! ...but I thought it was in Xillia" most of the time that I go somewhere. I had also forgotten that this is one of the games in the series where some of the bosses will kick your ass really hard on difficulties higher than normal, but so far I have not lowered the difficulty. I am pretty sure that I got very, very lucky for one certain boss in particular, but I'm not complaining.

I am going to complain about the friendly AI, however. It's terrible! I think that like 90% of the difficulty of the difficult parts is because the AI doesn't seem to want to dodge properly and instead prefers to block stuff, and of course that will result in an eventual guard break and taking massive damage or a boss hi-ougi in the face, which also means taking massive damage. I'm always fine, and if I do die, it's because I'm probably either trying to protect the rest of the team from dying or because they all died from not dodging and I'm trying to life bottle them back to life and the boss uses that chance to kill me and them. This game's difficulty is probably ruined by multiplayer...
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Mero
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Mero »

There's a scene that you miss if you play as Milla on the first playthrough, I played as Milla.
Steven
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Steven »

I heard there is a decent amount of stuff that you miss if you choose Milla, with no equivalent unique scenes to make up for it, and that choosing Milla first makes some parts of the story make less sense, too. In that case, it might have been better to force the player to choose Jude first and only allow Milla to be selected after you finish the game at least once.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by sunnshiner »

I'm digging playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2X (OG Xbox) at the minute. I spent/wasted so many happy hours playing the first two games on the PS1 with my friends while listening to Mark and Lard on Radio 1 BITD :lol:

And Outrun 2 on pc, obvs. There's been a recent update/mod called OutRun2006Tweaks that fixes and improves some stuff-

https://github.com/emoose/OutRun2006Tweaks

Rumble's working properly now for xinput pads which is pretty cool cos that's the one thing that I couldn't get to work on the pc version.

I'm dipping in and out of Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing on 360 too. I love Transformed but this one seems a little more frantic and I like the cast of characters better in this game. Also, that first Samba de Amigo stage? Pass me the mushrooms.
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Lander
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Lander »

Milla's English VA is certainly something. Witneth the almighty Maxthwell, thpirit lord of the four elementh!
Spoiler
It makes more sense once she's revealed to be a construct created by the real Maxwell.
Still, perhaps a bit on the nose :P
I wonder, does she have a comparable affectation in the Japanese dub?
Steven
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Steven »

She does not. I've heard that supposedly it's because the audio is super/poorly compressed on at least the overseas version. It's one of the only games in the series where I have only the overseas version and not the Japanese version, so I can't personally check how the audio quality is on the Japanese version and have to resort to Youtube instead. Hopefully they'll put out a nice PC version soon so I don't have to go mess around with ancient PS3s to play the Japanese version. Or the overseas version, but you know.

Should we make a Scamco Tales thread? I think there might be enough interest in the series here to warrant it. Or maybe there isn't, but...
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Squire Grooktook
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Squire Grooktook »

Sima Tuna wrote: Wed Jan 22, 2025 4:23 pm
Steven wrote: Wed Jan 22, 2025 9:04 am
Sima Tuna wrote: Tue Jan 21, 2025 4:03 pm Girls love the Tales series. My sister is a much bigger Tales fan than I am. She owns all the games that were localized. I don't know why girls love Tales so much, but they really do.
Got bored today and decided to do some research about it in Japanese. Turns out that the answer is pretty simple, and exactly what I expected: a lot of Japanese girls find the male characters in Tales games to be super hot. That's the reason.
I think it also has to do with the number of Tales games with large, fleshed-out female casts. Aside from the token titty monster in each game, most of the girls tend to be fairly realistically-proportioned too. Some of the Tales games have female protagonists and others have female Deuteragonists or female "Main" characters who aren't the point-of-view character (like Collette in Symphonia.)
Pretty sure the hook is mostly the pretty boys :lol: Women do be horny.

Fun fact the biggest fan girl of the series I know, I met through the porn she drew of one of my favorite video games. To this day her favored drawings subjects broadly encompass "muscly handsome rogues and squishy girls in thongs".
RegalSin wrote:Japan an almost perfect society always threatened by outsiders....................

Instead I am stuck in the America's where women rule with an iron crotch, and a man could get arrested for sitting behind a computer too long.
Aeon Zenith - My STG.
sunnshiner
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by sunnshiner »

Squire Grooktook wrote: Fri Jan 24, 2025 1:13 am To this day her favored drawings subjects broadly encompass "muscly handsome rogues and squishy girls in thongs".
Got a link? Asking for a friend, obvs...
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m.sniffles.esq
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by m.sniffles.esq »

Okay, after about 35 hours (which is nothing to sneeze at) I've hit the proverbial wall with Grim Dawn, as it's become a trash management sim

Now I spend 6 minutes killing monsters, then 20 fucking with gear. As 99% of the drops are either garbage, or 3-5 levels above me. The problem with the latter being, you're given so little storage space in proportion to the mountains of over-leveled gear that drops. So you're forced to make judgement calls on your wants/needs/desires four levels in the future (which you don't have any idea about).

The thing that strikes me about this, is while a lot of these game fall into this trap ('people like loot, so we gotta have lots and lots and lots of it'), Grim Dawn was originally recommended to me by someone who shared my love of Record of Lodoss War (dreamcast version, not the newer castlevania clone). And while it's obvious the Grim Dawn devs played RoLW and borrowed some aspects, they neglected to rip-off probably it's most ingenious feature, the upgrade system. In doing so, absolutely any and every drop could be directly used towards making whatever gear you're using better.

At the very least, they should have included an option to buy more storage space so I'd have something to do with the massive amount of gold I've amassed...
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Steven »

Almost done with Tales of Graces f, as I'm in the final dungeon of the regular/original game now, so I haven't gotten to the f part yet. I'm at 38 hours, but I've done almost none of the optional stuff and I also have the fast run enabled.

I really don't know what to say about this game. It's very weird to replay a game/this game and remember absolutely nothing about it other than that the final boss of the f part is really hard. I guess that's how much of an impression this game's story didn't have on me previously. I'll probably finish the regular part of the game tonight/tomorrow and then the f part by probably this time next week, depending on how much time I have to play the game, but that part's really short compared to the rest of the game. Probably won't return to Graces f for a while, as I really was supposed to be playing Rebirth instead of taking that detour to play Vesperia.
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m.sniffles.esq
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by m.sniffles.esq »

Not gonna lie: I'm fucking with Hello Kitty Island Adventure
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vol.2
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by vol.2 »

Heretic. It's a lot of fun. I like the concept of Doom but with Wizards and magical creatures.

I did play Hexen already, but this is my first time playing Heretic. I have to say I actually like Heretic better. I'm not anti-Hexen by any means, but I don't like the added emphasis in Hexen on finding secret doors to advance. Imagine if you were playing Doom, and you couldn't find a secret door that only opens when you stand in a specific square, but you can't advance to the next level until you find it. That's what Hexen is like sometimes and it's horribly frustrating. Worse even than pixel hunting nonsense in point and click games because at least in those you can scan across the screen with your cursor and stumble upon it. In Hexen, you literally "just have to know" that certain doors will open in a certain way, and there's absolutely no environmental clues as to that. You will accidentally stumble into many of them, but there's going to be a point in everyone's first run of Hexen where you get stuck and it will just come down to trying literally every wall and standing in every square until something happens.

Heretic isn't like that at all. The secrets are either obvious, or there are good environmental clues. And the levels look great. I especially like the water levels in the 3rd episode.

Image
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Sima Tuna
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sima Tuna »

Heretic kicks ass.
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Sumez
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sumez »

vol.2 wrote: Fri Jan 31, 2025 2:33 am Worse even than pixel hunting nonsense in point and click games because at least in those you can scan across the screen with your cursor and stumble upon it.
Man, I'm gonna have to inquire about this, because it's something I hear about so often that I can't help wonder where it comes from.
I've played tons and tons of games in the genre, and I guess there might be a couple of examples of this happening? - me missing an important item because you can barely spot it in the artwork, and you'd have to stumble upon it with the cursor like you described. But if you put me on the spot, I wouldn't be able to name any single specific instance.

Yet, people often tend to act like it's a common issue of the genre, if not straight up *genre defining*. What are some games, or some specific examples, that make you point out this issue? I'm genuinely curious.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

Sumez wrote:snip
Specific examples in Rex Nebular:

The rebreather early on in the game is a fairly small clump of pixels beside a table: https://lparchive.org/Rex-Nebular-and-t ... date%2002/

There's a credit card you need to take out of someone's hand, but examining their body tells you it's there to find and it's visibly coloured different. There's also something you need to steal out of someone's back pocket later, and this one is less hinted at. All in all, not brutal examples compared to some others out there, but it does take a patient approach to hovering your cursor over everything to see if the examine text changes to something of interest. I seem to recall some Sierra games having nastier examples.

I can't recall if this one does it but I seem to remember some games letting you cycle through with Tab to select objects of interest in the room, rather than pixel hunting.
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vol.2
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by vol.2 »

Sumez wrote: Fri Jan 31, 2025 7:02 am
Man, I'm gonna have to inquire about this, because it's something I hear about so often that I can't help wonder where it comes from.
I've played tons and tons of games in the genre, and I guess there might be a couple of examples of this happening? - me missing an important item because you can barely spot it in the artwork, and you'd have to stumble upon it with the cursor like you described. But if you put me on the spot, I wouldn't be able to name any single specific instance.
Well, I think if any of us are "put on the spot," it might be tough to recall an hard-to-spot item in an adventure game we played years ago. There's nothing surprising to me about that.
Yet, people often tend to act like it's a common issue of the genre, if not straight up *genre defining*. What are some games, or some specific examples, that make you point out this issue? I'm genuinely curious.
I think the main reason is that the early Sierra games were especially rife with hidden items, to the point where the task was a feature and not a bug. In those AGI games, you not only had to contend with impossible to see items, but you had to fight with the text parser to string together the phrase which would allow you to discover them. The four leaf clover in King's Quest, which you must not only assume is findable, but must be search for in just the right way. The golden egg in the tree in Hero's Quest that you can get by climbing and searching for, or by throwing rocks (why would I throw rocks at a tree?). I would say that most items in the 80s Sierra games were made to blend into the background as that was a way of creating a challenge for the player. It was cheap, but it was early days and they were working with what they had. As time went by, the games became more clever and the puzzles tended to rely more and more on testing actual reasoning and not on "pixel hunting" or trial and error (can I climb the tree, what will happen if I do?), but those things never fully left the genre, and they stuck around as a cheap and easy way to make a puzzle difficult when the developer didn't want to or couldn't think of a better way to make a more interesting challenge. There were plenty of moments in The Fate of Atlantis that had pixel hunts like the random piece of red cloth in the Bedouin's collapsed house, or the wax cat in the beginning. The first Gabriel Knight game has a fairly notorious pixel hunt involving a snake scale you must find that is on the ground in the grass and bares absolutely no difference from the surroundings. In fact, the whole game is like that and there's a "hi res mode" in the CD version that renders the selectable items double resolution so they visually stand apart from the background when you mouse over them, a feature they implemented because they knew how impossible it was to make out items from the background.

Can I give you a list of the toughest, most unfair pixel hunts in adventure game history? No, my specific memory of playing all those games isn't good enough for that. However, I can tell you unequivocally that most early adventure games (especially the Sierra stuff) were filled with pixel guesswork, in which you had to study a 2D background and, in many cases, try to imagine what it actually was you were staring at, and then spend what feels like eons popping phrases into a parser hoping that you were not only correct in your assumptions, but that you were using the super specific word(s) that the designers chose to identify them. In many cases, those words would be crossword puzzle level archaic word usage, and impossible for a child (me) to know.

As time went by, we all got better at doing the pixel hunting dance because we got wise that we needed to scan backgrounds exhaustively, and the games made that process much easier with the established norms of the mouse cursor over the text parser, and with higher resolution graphics, allowing a small item to be (slightly) more accurately represented. However, that didn't stop games from occasionally expecting you to find a black item in a sea of darkness with a hit box the size of a dust partical.
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Daytime Waitress
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Daytime Waitress »

It's weird, memetic, how even those of us who only played LucasArts stuff, none of Roberta Williams' games, still internalised that phrase, then.
If only we had a linguist among us to dissect how that kind of thing could happen...


As for me, I'm back to enjoying the comforts of Assetto Corsa's modding community after the frankly disastrous launch of ACEVO a couple of weeks back.
$50 for a beta.
Alpha.
Tech demo.
Where are my strikeout tags?
I could've ridden with even that, being "updated Competizione physics on a new, proprietary, non-Unreal graphics engine - now with road cars!".
But then they've gone and tied every facet of their game progression (car unlocks, customisation and in-game economy) to their company servers.
Understandable that those are not firing on all cylinders at this stage of the development cycle.
Completely unacceptable that my single player profile needs to "phone home" every time I boot up the game, even if I just want to race against the AI.
33GB on my hard drive and y'all can't manage a 192kb local .ini file for personal settings?
Absolutely fucking not.

500+ hours in the (heavily modded) original, and probably 50+ in the GT3-focused sequel, I was gutted about this being a Modern Video Games Industry shit sundae,
but something something stages of grief,
random people have made sub-200bhp Japanese race car mods for an interpretation of the original 1960's Suzuka,
what the "official" devs and their publishing masters have in store for the future is of no concern to me.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by guigui »

m.sniffles.esq wrote: Thu Jan 30, 2025 7:35 pm Not gonna lie: I'm fucking with Hello Kitty Island Adventure
Care to develop a little ? Always looking for kids-friendly game here.
Bravo jolie Ln, tu as trouvé : l'armée de l'air c'est là où on peut te tenir par la main.
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m.sniffles.esq
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by m.sniffles.esq »

Care to develop a little ? Always looking for kids-friendly game here.
Just watch a trailer. It's a case of it being exactly what it appears to be.

If I have one criticism, I wish they would have add a way to rotate the camera. I know it was developed for phone/tablet--where such perks aren't usually included--but they should have added that function for the console port.

(also, I find that they announced the physical version directly after releasing the digital--so that sanrio collectors would have to buy both--to be a bit on the sleazy side. But then again, the collector's market in general tends to live a bit on that side, so I guess it's par for the course)
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by XoPachi »

Haven't played Devil May Cry 1 in 20 years. Forgot how much fun this game was. Was always my favorite.
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Sima Tuna
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sima Tuna »

Shogun Shodown. Very cool tile-based deckbuilder. Feels a lot more like a full-on pure strategy game due to the way all actions consume a turn. I guess you could think of it as a combination of a traditional roguelike and Slay the Spire. You're given these little tiles that represent different weapons or attacks and they work on a cooldown system. You don't "draw" cards. You always have your little deck of these tiles on you, but they go on cooldown. Moving takes a turn, as does equipping a weapon or attacking. You need to learn how to manipulate enemy AI to keep them from hurting you while you set up your own weapon combos.
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Sumez
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sumez »

m.sniffles.esq wrote: Sat Feb 01, 2025 10:13 pm
Care to develop a little ? Always looking for kids-friendly game here.
Just watch a trailer. It's a case of it being exactly what it appears to be.
From what I could tell from the 10 seconds I bothered looking, it's an Animal Crossing clone? Could have just said that :P :P
Here I was, hoping for a cute soulslike featuring Hello Kitty
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guigui
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by guigui »

Sumez wrote: Mon Feb 03, 2025 7:09 am
m.sniffles.esq wrote: Sat Feb 01, 2025 10:13 pm
Care to develop a little ? Always looking for kids-friendly game here.
Just watch a trailer. It's a case of it being exactly what it appears to be.
From what I could tell from the 10 seconds I bothered looking, it's an Animal Crossing clone? Could have just said that :P :P
Here I was, hoping for a cute soulslike featuring Hello Kitty
Quick reviews say there also is an "exploration" part in the game, sounds good. Comes from a mobile game, sounds not that good.
Any more input from sniffles ?
Bravo jolie Ln, tu as trouvé : l'armée de l'air c'est là où on peut te tenir par la main.
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Daytime Waitress
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Daytime Waitress »

Sumez wrote: Mon Feb 03, 2025 7:09 am
m.sniffles.esq wrote: Sat Feb 01, 2025 10:13 pm
Care to develop a little ? Always looking for kids-friendly game here.
Just watch a trailer. It's a case of it being exactly what it appears to be.
From what I could tell from the 10 seconds I bothered looking, it's an Animal Crossing clone? Could have just said that :P :P
Here I was, hoping for a cute soulslike featuring Hello Kitty
I feel like the machinations of how it came about could be more interesting than the game itself.
Sanrio and Nintendo teamed up with Kitty and Co.-themed furniture for amiibo cards or whatever the heck they were called with New Leaf on the 3DS, and somewhere thereafter Sanrio just went: "Yeah, well, I'm gonna go build my own Animal Crossing. With blackjack and Kuromi!"
Did they come to Nintendo for another collab and get rebuffed?
Did they just realise the potential for it and try to cut out the middleman entirely?
Inquiring minds want to know!
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m.sniffles.esq
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by m.sniffles.esq »

From what I could tell from the 10 seconds I bothered looking, it's an Animal Crossing clone?
You obviously didn't get to the good part. Maybe that's at 20 seconds?

You get stranded on an island/abandoned amusement park with a bunch of talking animals, explore, and have adventures. I guess the first part is supposed to get in the animal crossing crowd. However, unlike that game, you explore and have adventures with secret temples and ghosts and ziplines and shit, not just grind away at an endless mortgage to a racoon.

Yeah, it was an apple arcade game. So was Air Twister, and that game rules. Perhaps content can be independent of it's venue? Not for me to say. Anyhow, the only mobile 'carry-over' is that the camera remains fixed, which I already mentioned as sucking. I guess if I wanted to put on my child psychologist hat, I could say the game is potentially harmful because it teaches kids that the concept of friendship is completely transactional. But then again, animal crossing taught kids life is a march to the tomb grinding away at an endless mortgage to a racoon, and no one had any problem with it.

This is honestly the most I'd ever thought I would have to describe Hello Kitty: Island Adventure.

(btw, after this exchange

"what's this thing like?"
"watch this 30 seconds, and you'll know"
"I refuse. Why don't you explain it to me instead?"


To then acquiesce, and actually explain, shows some Job-like patience on my part. I don't expect to be congratulated or anything. But I did want it pointed out for future generations)
Steven
Posts: 3730
Joined: Tue May 11, 2021 5:24 am
Location: Tokyo

Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Steven »

Done with Tales of Graces f PC version. Completion time was 57 hours, 6 minutes, 9 seconds. Game was played entirely on hard. The last boss was not as difficult as I remembered, but it did take 27 minutes and 31.1 seconds (which felt like an eternity) after using my last All-Divide halfway through the fight. It is extremely discouraging to see yourself doing only double or triple digit damage to a boss with over half a million HP. I did restart the boss fight once after a few minutes because I wanted to change my strategy and characters, but I never game overed against this boss (almost did twice, but I managed to not die somehow), so I consider that a good victory. The entire f part of the game is a very noticeable difficulty spike compared to the ending of the normal game, but it was fun the whole time.

I do wish that the friendly AI was better, or at least had more and better options. This is one of the very few game design things that Team Symphonia did better than Team Destiny. Not the AI itself, because it's about equally stupid in most games in the series, but Team Symphonia typically offered more options for AI behaviour from what I remember. While fighting the final boss of the normal part of the game, Cheria was spamming healing after someone else would block and take almost no damage. Healing is fine, but not when I'm at 99.95% HP. How about using fucking Indignation instead? To be fair, I think this was due to how I had her AI configured, but it was still annoying to have to manually tell her to attack instead of waste CC on unneeded healing and having her DPS go in the toilet.

I ended up with 1260 Grade. It's hilarious and very awkward to start with 3190 Grade in the pre-game Grade Shop and then end up being able to buy less things on loop 2, but I believe I still have enough to buy everything that I'd want, so in the end it's all good, and I can go do some grinding (yuck) if I really want more Grade. I never used the SP bonus multipliers that I bought for loop 1. Around when it was time to go to the final boss, I regretted not having gotten the EXP multipliers just in case, but I didn't need those either.

Overall, I am very pleased with the PC version of the game. The only glitch I saw was in Pascal's hi-ougi with Mecha-Asbel... who failed to show up to do the hi-ougi, so it was just Pascal, riding on nothing. That was quite funny. I wish I had enabled my recording thing prior to that happening. I really gotta do that more often in case I see funny glitches like that. Anyway, yeah, PC version's excellent aside from the broken 16:10 support and storing graphics settings in the Steam Cloud, which may mess up your settings if you go back and forth between computers and/or Steam Deck, so just go get it and don't hesitate.

I guess this means that my Tales detour's over and it's time to go back to Rebirth. I thought about switching to the PSP version, but it's way more of a hassle to actually go get it somehow than to simply put the game disc in my PS2 and turn on the Retrotink.
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guigui
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Location: France

Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by guigui »

m.sniffles.esq wrote: Mon Feb 03, 2025 9:17 am (btw, after this exchange

"what's this thing like?"
"watch this 30 seconds, and you'll know"
"I refuse. Why don't you explain it to me instead?"


To then acquiesce, and actually explain, shows some Job-like patience on my part. I don't expect to be congratulated or anything. But I did want it pointed out for future generations)
Well, tbh honest yes I can watch some trailers and read reviews online. However I happen to love this shmup community, and share most of people here gaming's opinion and liking.
This is why I will always prefer recomendations given by a fellow player on this forum, than some random reviews (dont mean to be rude with people actually working hard to write review, sorry) and videos anywhere else on the interweb.

I guess this is also why this thread is so popular ? You tell which game you play and like and why, and people in the community may discover new titles to try for themselves. If this is not the main point here, then why would I care about What [not shmup] game are you playing now?
Bravo jolie Ln, tu as trouvé : l'armée de l'air c'est là où on peut te tenir par la main.
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